Garment District Leaders Decide to Again Call Neighborhood Garment District

After a year-long search, Garment District landlords and business leaders have picked a name to highlight the neighborhood's ongoing transformation from clothing factories to hip office buildings and boutiques: the Garment District.

Some local landlords had pushed for a new name to make a cleaner break with the past—with ideas ranging from MiSo, for Midtown South, to the Devil's Arcade, as the area was known when it was much rougher. But the choice to embrace the area's traditional name avoids the mockery some have faced in trying to conjure clever monikers to give their areas a new shine.

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Barbara Blair Randall, president of the Fashion Center Business Improvement District, during a walk through the neighborhood in July 2012.
Kevin Hagen for The Wall Street Journal

"New Yorkers are savvy. They're smart. You can't pull one over on them," said Barbara Blair Randall, president of the Fashion Center Business Improvement District, a group of landlords and businesses whose members have worked to rebrand the neighborhood as a diverse hub for tourists, tech workers and creative types.

Of course, no one has the power to rename a New York neighborhood, as has been discovered by brokers and developers from SpaHa (Spanish Harlem) to ProCro (Prospect Heights/Crown Heights). But the name change will formally apply to Ms. Randall's group, which will become the Garment District Alliance.

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The group, which collects a fee from local landlords, provides sanitation, streetscape improvements and marketing for the area roughly from 35th to 41st streets between Fifth and Ninth Avenues. It hired consultants late last year, who produced a list of about 100 potential names. The BID now will launch a campaign to emphasize the nonfashion-related amenities that have opened in the area. It will swap a logo featuring a button for one depicting a section of the neighborhood's street grid that suggests the word "IN." Signs could beckon visitors to "Explore IN" or "Dine IN" the Garment District.

At least one landlord liked the idea of resurrecting one of the district's past identities, the Devil's Arcade. "It was a showstopper," said Eric Gural, one of the largest building owners in the area, of the name. "You kind of get to start fresh in terms of what that neighborhood is."

The neighborhood's identity was also remade in the 1920s. Retailers on Fifth Avenue grew tired of garment-factory workers hanging around on the sidewalks, so they conceived of the district as a way to push them west, where they thrived for decades, according to Sharon Zukin, author of "Naked City," a book about the evolution of New York City's neighborhoods, and other historians. "The name of the garment district is also a historical invention," she said.

In the 1990s, the Fashion Center designation was intended to highlight a move away from manufacturing to more high-end fashion design. Despite the efforts at rebranding, the Garment District had evolved more slowly than many neighborhoods. For one thing, zoning restrictions require landlords to preserve space in side-street buildings for clothing production. When the Fashion Center BID was formed in 1993, the neighborhood was about 85% fashion tenants. Today, it is less than 50%, according to Ms. Randall.

That change has sped up in the last couple of years, local landlords say. New hotels have been built, and technology firms, public-relations agencies, architects and nonprofit groups have been chased by rising prices in Chelsea, Flatiron and an area north of Madison Square Park lately dubbed "NoMad." Office rents in the Garment District still hover around the mid-$30s to low $40s a square foot, landlords say. That ranks them well below the mid-$60s rents Chelsea buildings are fetching.

Other names considered and rejected would have embraced real-estate industry jargon, selling the neighborhood's proximity to other districts—Times Square South, North Chelsea and Midtown West.

Simply embracing the old name isn't going to stop the trajectory of change, but some garment-industry advocates and lovers of nostalgia said they were happy with a name that would preserve at least some trace of the old.

Fashion-industry leaders said they disagreed that the name was mainly nostalgic. They rejected comparisons to the Meatpacking District, whose name has become a hip signifier rather than a description of an industry still percolating in the area.

"I think it's a little ironic because I don't know when we stopped being the Garment Center," said Nanette Lepore, a fashion designer who has been an advocate for maintaining the area's fashion component. She pointed to recent initiatives supported by fashion designers like Eli Tahari and Theory's Andrew Rosen that are helping boost clothing makers in the area.

"I hope it will be not just for nostalgia's sake but for the future's sake," Ms. Lepore said.

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